


We like things related to our survival

by sprx77



Series: everyone needs a place [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: "My fox friend would never", A universe where Naruto learns of the Kyuubi before anyone tells him about it, Gen, I just wanted to get this out, Naruto who grows up thinking of himself as sharing a body, Naruto who has to try really hard not to say "We", Our breath, Our hands, and then when he learns about the Kyuubi is like "Rude", befriends Kurama, but more importantly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 14:21:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10538298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: Naruto and Kurama meet before Naruto even leaves the orphanage. Naruto grows up with a second person under his skin-- in canon. Now he knows about Kurama, and refuses to keep him locked away.





	

 

Naruto and Kurama are two spirits in one body, and if one of them has inhabited the flesh longer it’s not by _much_. Honestly, the skin-prison spent months gestating with Kurama curled protectively around it and Naruto’s spirit only entered it towards the end, anyway.

For a brief, screaming half-hour, the soul that is Naruto wore his body alone, cold-wrong-lonely- _wrong_.

Then Kurama was nestled safe right next to his heart again, their essences mingling but remaining disjoint, autonomous.

So whose body it is remains a difficult question, and a headache to figure out who had it first or who had it longer. It’s an irrelevant question, because what’s definitively true is:

Naruto grew without conscious awareness of the second soul-- spirit?-- kept imprisoned in him. He is five when he first encounters the spirit-- god?--  who doesn’t have a body but has a _self_ , magnanimous to behold even for the boy who has been in its presence quite literally since conception.

A boy says, incredulous, “How did you get here!?”

A fox says, wry, “I’ve been here longer than you have, actually.”

-

The incident that leads to Sarutobi placing Naruto on his own in an off-the-books apartment is a messy affair, to the adults.

To the boy, it is terrifying.

See, he’s never had the chance to learn physical safety, on a basic level; doesn’t know what it’s like to go unmolested throughout a day, without a caretaker yanking his arm to get him out of bed, without food being roughly presented to him, without being shoved instead of led anywhere.

But that careless handling has nothing on being actively _attacked_ , and he is, by a chunin half-mad with grief and vengeance. Of course, he doesn’t know the circumstances, only that the usual roughness continues by a woman grabbing his shoulder and directing him away from the other children.

It’s not the caretaker.

Naruto, with no concept of personal space or haptic integrity, doesn’t have the ingrained response most children do to someone unfamiliar encroaching into their sphere of proximity.

That is to say, he has been unwittingly conditioned to not know the difference between which touches are uncomfortable or threatening; namely, that all touches are like that, so this one merits no special protest.

It is only when the woman brings her fist down to his skin that he realizes something is off, that it _hurts_ , and only when he’s struck for the third, fourth, fifth times that this is unlike the caretaker’s disciplinary smacks to the hands.

He screams and is silenced, finally, by a blow to the skull.

(The caretaker, _not_ being an idiot, despite her lack of love for most children but one child in specific, calls for the ANBU and her Kage as soon as she realizes the boy is gone. She is a genin, after all, and Shodaime knows what another village could do if they get the demon on their side. This is irrelevant, however, because what happens to Naruto at the time is:)

He wanders through a leaking underground mindscape, alone and confused, until he meets Kurama.

A boy asks, “But _how_ did you get here?” Impertinent for the first time in his life, emboldened by this new place and uncertainty.

A fox counters, “How did you?”

-

And _that_ is where their story starts, because Kurama is a spirit of destruction, a god of devouring, the deity of natural disasters and the two things that always, always, go with them: lost children and devastation.

Naruto is too young to have heard of the demon fox, Kyuubi; too young for school and the education that comes with it; too young to have travelled the streets and been pointed at, whispered about.

The only place Naruto knows is the orphanage, where the caretaker and cooks were carefully chosen for their discretion.

So Naruto doesn’t know about the chakra beast that destroyed the village, has no reason at all to be wary; and he has seen the way other children play without him, at the orphanage, and knows the word ‘friend’ if not how to have any; and so, barely hesitating, he wanders up, unafraid by the grace of childhood innocence, with no hatred or darkness in his heart, and with no concept of personal space.

He slips through the cage bars to sit at the feet of a primordial construct of justice and rage, of power and eradication given form, and after glancing both ways to make _absolutely sure_ the caretaker isn’t about to come yank him by the arm for daring:

Naruto sticks his hand out with a mega-watt smile.

A boy gives his name and says, “Can I be your friend?”

After a long, slow moment, a fox gives his name and says, “Yes.”

-

Sarutobi, heart aching, takes a bruised and bleeding young boy from ANBU barracks, where he had been healed of the worst of it.

The rest, given his heritage and host, will heal by the ‘morrow.

A Kage takes a jinchuuriki to his new home, already plotting the logistics of the thing, and ignores the frustration in the arches of his feet, the anger in his gut, that one of his own would turn against Minato’s _son_.

Knowledge known or not, this is a _child of the leaf_ , and even if he weren’t a jinchuuriki-- but he is, and precious to Sarutobi besides, so this one instance had to be an example, had to be the _only_ occurrence.

Ten year chunin Sugihara Hisano is beheaded at the market at noon. An S-rank secret is _enforced_.

But Naruto, Sarutobi ensures, knows none of that darkness. He is sound asleep in his new apartment, untroubled in the healing sleep an ANBU medic initiated, and the Hokage takes a day with iron resolve to sit by his successor’s son and let the gentle sunlight fall on them in the living room.

He knows he’s made the right decision when the boy smiles, peacefully, in his sleep.

When Naruto wakes, he’s introduced to his Hokage, his _Jiji_ , and gains a _second_ precious person mere minutes after the first.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, hit me up with headcanons, comments, happiness or fan-induced flailing at definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com/ask !! :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [we](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10666491) by [IceisAwesome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceisAwesome/pseuds/IceisAwesome)




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